The Vatican pushback on how faith-based layabout Kim Davis and her lawyers played the pope is getting serious now.

Yayo Grassi, an openly gay man, brought his partner, Iwan Bagus, as well several other friends to the Vatican Embassy on September 23 for a brief visit with the Pope. A video of the meeting shows Grassi and Francis greeting each other with a warm hug.

There's a video. I would point out that Mat Staver, Davis's lawyer, promised us photos on Wednesday. He hasn't shown us even a phony picture of Davis and the pope in Peru yet.

I resemble that remark. Anyway, I have something of a history with Newsbusters, and with the Media Resource Center. A few years ago, they gave me one of their annual awards. OK, it was based on a completely dishonest reading of something I wrote but, still, an award is an award. But what really stung was that they didn't invite me to the banquet to accept it. I had a great acceptance speech ready. I would have killed, I tell you. Instead, they had Sam Freaking Donaldson accept in my place. Punks.

In addition, there's a terrific essay in this month's Harper's in which Randall Kennedy responds to Coates (and to several other writers) on the value of what Kennedy calls "the politics of respectability" to the ongoing civil rights struggle. These are heavyweights engaged in serious argument. Myself? I feel very strongly both ways.

My pal Michael Goldfarb – not that Michael Goldfarb – has been writing from Europe for Tiger Beat On The Potomac. (Pass the Chateau Petrus, kidz.) Here, he takes a long look at the relationship between Israel and the Kurds. Blog says check it out.

From The Mystical, Musical Land Of Oz: Blog Music Guru Bill Osment sends along a remarkably good dub of a concert that The Master did in Norway this week. Still can't get over Dylan doing the Great American Songbook, but anyone who expects predictability from the man hasn't been listening to him since 1965.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here are Sid Millman And His Nitwits playing St. Louis Blues because it's my blog, that's why. History is so cool.

On the downside, the great Irish playwright Brian Friel passed away this week. I was lucky enough to see his Dancing At Lughnasa when the Abbey toured it, and I saw Faith Healer on Broadway with Ralph Fiennes, Cherry Jones, and the remarkable Ian McDiarmiud who, at the time, was on the nation's movie screens as the Emperor Palpatine.

Friel was a man of letters, but he was also a man of his time, and a man of political courage. He was at the Bloody Sunday March in Derry in 1972, ducking for cover when the British paratroopers opened up on unarmed civil-rights demonstrators, and his Freedom Of The City was written in a burst of outrage at what he'd seen.

But the Friel play that struck home the hardest was Translations, which I saw when an Irish company was touring it back in the early 1980's. The play is about the crushing of the native Irish culture and the native Irish language in the form of the Anglicization of the place names in Ireland; the play takes place in Baile Beag, the scene of most of Friel's plays, which is in the process of being renamed Ballybeg through the kindness of the Crown. But the main characters are language and memory, as the last rusty weapons left with which to fight a kind of cultural imperialism. As one of his characters explains,

"…Yes, it is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to... inevitabilities."

And here are Meryl and the other Mundy sisters in the most beloved scene from Dancing At Lughnasa. The lights are dim tonight in Ballybeg. An chuid eile i síocháin, Brian.

(By the way, writing-wise, "a syntax opulent with tomorrows" is the real shiz-nit.)

Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It's always a good day for dinosaur news!

According to a new paper published in Science, the Chicxulub impact may have accelerated volcanic activity and helped to release toxic gas from a massive (200,000 square miles massive) lava lake in India known as the Deccan Traps. The researchers point out that the impact didn't cause the geologic activity (like the sea of melted metal) but it's likely that it intensified the situation. That one-two punch of asteroid impact and volcanoes could be the reason why 66 million years ago 70 percent of species on the planet were wiped out.

If it's not one damned thing, it's another. Lucky for us that dinosaurs lived then in order to make us happy now.

I'll be back on Monday with the usual gobshitery. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line, or I'm dumping y'all into the Deccan Traps.

Charles P. PierceCharles P Pierce is the author of four books, mostly recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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